page_title: Computer chess
section_title: Timeline
hierarchical_section_title: Computer chess / History / Timeline
caption_attribution_description: English: Released in 1977, Boris was one of the first chess computers to be widely marketed.
context_page_description: Computer chess includes both hardware and software capable of playing chess. Computer chess provides opportunities for players to practice even in the absence of human opponents, and also provides opportunities for analysis, entertainment and training.
  Computer chess applications that play at the level of a chess master or higher are available on hardware from super-computers to smart phones. Standalone chess-playing machines are also available. Stockfish, GNU Chess, Fruit, and other free open source applications are available for various platforms.
  Computer chess applications, whether implemented in hardware or software, employ a different paradigm than humans to choose their moves: they use heuristic methods to build, search and evaluate trees representing sequences of moves from the current position and attempt to execute the best such sequence during play. Such trees are typically quite large, thousands to millions of nodes.
context_section_description: 1769 – Wolfgang von Kempelen builds the Turk. Presented as a chess-playing automaton, it is secretly operated by a human player hidden inside the machine.
  1868 – Charles Hooper presents the Ajeeb automaton — which also has a human chess player hidden inside.
  1912 – Leonardo Torres y Quevedo builds El Ajedrecista, a machine that could play King and Rook versus King endgames.
  1941 – Predating comparable work by at least a decade, Konrad Zuse develops computer chess algorithms in his Plankalkül programming formalism. Because of the circumstances of the Second World War, however, they were not published, and did not come to light, until the 1970s.
  1948 – Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics describes how a chess program could be developed using a depth-limited minimax search with an evaluation function.
  1950 – Claude Shannon publishes "Programming a Computer for Playing Chess", one of the first papers on the algorithmic methods of computer chess.
  1951 – Alan Turing is first to publish a program, developed on paper, that was capable of playing a full game of chess (dubbed Turochamp).
  1952 – Dietrich Prinz develops a program that solves chess problems.
  1956 – Los Alamos chess is the first program to play a chess-like game, developed by Paul Stein and Mark Wells for the MANIAC I computer.
  1956 – John McCarthy invents the alpha-beta search algorithm.
  1957 – The first programs that can play a full game of chess are developed, one by Alex Bernstein and one by Russian programmers using a BESM.
  1958 – NSS becomes the first chess program to use the alpha-beta search algorithm.
  1962 – The first program to play credibly, Kotok-McCarthy, is published at MIT.
  1963 – Grandmaster David Bronstein defeats an M-20 running an early chess program.
  1966–67 – The first chess match between computer programs is played. Moscow Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) defeats Kotok-McCarthy at Stanford University by telegraph over nine months.
  1967 – Mac Hack VI, by Richard Greenblatt et al. introduces transposition tables and employs dozens of carefully tuned move selection heuristics; it becomes the first program to defeat a person in tournament play.  Mac Hack VI played about C class level.
  1968 – Scottish chess champion David Levy makes a 500 pound bet with AI pioneers John McCarthy and Donald Michie that no computer program would win a chess match against him within 10 years.
  1970 – Monty Newborn and the Association for Computing Machinery organize the first North American Computer Chess Championships in New York.
  1971 – Ken Thompson, an American Computer scientist at Bell Labs and creator of the Unix operating system, writes his first chess-playing program called "chess" for the earliest version of Unix.
  1974 – David Levy, Ben Mittman and Monty Newborn organize the first World Computer Chess Championship which is won by the Russian program Kaissa.
  1975 – After nearly a decade of only marginal progress since the high-water mark of Greenblatt's MacHack VI in 1967, Northwestern University Chess 4.5 is introduced featuring full-width search, and innovations of bitboards and iterative deepening.  It also reinstated a transposition table as first seen in Greenblatt's program.  It was thus the first program with an integrated modern structure and became the model for all future development.  Chess 4.5 played strong B-class and won the 3rd World Computer Chess Championship that year. Northwestern University Chess and its descendants dominated computer chess until the era of hardware chess machines in the early 80's.
  1976 – In December, Canadian programmer Peter R. Jennings releases Microchess, the first game for microcomputers to be sold.
  1977 – In March, Fidelity Electronics releases Chess Challenger, the first dedicated chess computer to be sold.  The International Computer Chess Association is founded by chess programmers to organize computer chess championships and report on research and advancements on computer chess in their journal. Also that year, Applied Concepts released Boris, a dedicated chess computer in a wooden box with pla
caption: Released in 1977, Boris was one of the first chess computers to be widely marketed. It ran on a Fairchild F8 8-bit microprocessor with only 2.5 KiB ROM and 256 byte RAM.
exif: {"Image Make": "Panasonic", "Image Model": "DMC-ZR1", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "180", "Image YResolution": "180", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Ver.1.0", "Image DateTime": "2019:03:29 17:52:04", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image ExifOffset": "634", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 50, 53, 48, 0, 0, 14, 0, 1, 0, 22, 0, ... ]", "Image Tag 0xC6D2": "[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... ]", "Image Tag 0xC6D3": "[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, ... ]", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "180", "Thumbnail YResolution": "180", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "10740", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6298", "Thumbnail YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/20", "EXIF FNumber": "33/10", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "400", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2019:03:29 17:52:04", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2019:03:29 17:52:04", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "4", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "86/25", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Tungsten (incandescent light)", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "9/2", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1600", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1200", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "10352", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Manual", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "0", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "25", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "High gain up", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Soft", "EXIF Sharpness": "Soft"}